PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Gov­ern­ments over the course of many years have paid over $200 mil­lion in re­search work for road and drainage works which were ul­ti­mate­ly not utilised in any way, Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan said yes­ter­day.

“We did a lot of stud­ies in Trinidad, as I said if you, the for­mer min­is­ter of Wa­ter Re­source Gan­ga Singh, he al­so re­ferred to we’ll look at the stud­ies, the stud­ies are on the shelf and why we not us­ing the stud­ies be­cause he’s quite aware that we spent a lot of mon­ey on for­eign con­sul­tants to do these stud­ies but they were all loans that we had to pay back and those loans were just for the stud­ies.

“They had no en­gi­neer­ing and the hy­draulic de­signs and draw­ings that goes along with it. No plan in place as to how we op­er­a­tionalise these plans,” Sinanan said dur­ing the sod-turn­ing cer­e­mo­ny for the Mar­itime Round­about project in Barataria.

Sinanan said as a re­sult of this the Gov­ern­ment ap­proached the De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca (CAF) con­cern­ing speak­ing to con­sul­tants to op­er­a­tionalise those find­ings.

“Rather than go­ing to pay for an­oth­er study to do the south West Penisu­la, we en­gaged CAF and we told them look, you give us a grant for that, you pay for a con­sul­tant be­cause the con­sul­tant has to sat­is­fy the lender that the plan is im­ple­mentable,” he said.

A billboard showing projected design for the Morvant to Maritime Roundabout Upgrade Project during yesterday’s sod- turning ceremony.

ANISTO ALVES

“So they brought in the con­sul­tant, we en­gaged the drainage di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Works, lo­cal gov­ern­ment, we en­gaged all the stake­hold­ers and they are work­ing on an op­er­a­tional plan for us, as for how we can im­ple­ment all the stud­ies that we have.”

How­ev­er, he not­ed that this arrange­ment placed them in a new loan arrange­ment with the De­vel­op­ment Bank over a 30-year pe­ri­od.

The Mor­vant to Mar­itime project was one of the pro­grammes op­er­a­tionalised in this man­ner and is set to cost an es­ti­mat­ed $48.5 mil­lion. He said they hope to bring fur­ther al­le­vi­a­tion to traf­fic and flood­ing con­cerns in the Mor­vant and Barataria area with its com­ple­tion.

“You’d recog­nise you’d spend more time ap­proach­ing the ramp there than just clear­ing the bus route, than you would prob­a­bly spend from Aranguez to Port-of-Spain if you’re go­ing down the high­way be­cause there is a bot­tle­neck in that area. So part of this project is to try to as­sist the traf­fic flow in the area by widen­ing up the in­ter­sec­tions, cre­at­ing prop­er round­abouts and so try­ing to cut down on the time spent on the Mor­vant junc­tion,” he said.

“Al­so, there is a re­build­ing of the bridge. That struc­ture has been delip­i­dat­ed for quite a while. As I said be­fore, there was some re­pairs done be­fore that did not help with the flood­ing, so once that bridge is re­built we ex­pect to have some re­lief in terms of the flood­ing which will help the ma­jor flood prob­lem we have in the Barataria round­about.”

The project will see the widen­ing of the bridge to six lanes as well as im­prove­ment of the Pri­or­i­ty Bus route and Mar­itime in­ter­sec­tions. The project is ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed in 11 months.